Sundays are sheet changing days around here. Once I’ve woken up and had a cup of tea (a delicious Kenyan TGFOP or tippy golden flower orange pekoe today), I get to the work of stripping and remaking beds.
Mine and Matt’s, a queen size bed I cannot reach all the way across, takes five to ten minutes max, and that includes lying on the floor and reaching up between the footboard and the mattress to pull down the quilt all the way. Otherwise, my rather fluffy comforter gets lumpy and the bed never looks smooth. That also includes three decorative pillows and a throw across the foot.
Simon’s bed, on the other hand, takes about a half an hour, and nothing I do makes the task faster. The issue is not the bed, which is a twin I can easily reach all the way across, but rather all the bed accoutrement. It’s insane. We’re fast running out of room for, well, Simon.
When he first moved into the big-boy bed, we shoved some of his crib friends in with him and lined up a few wooden cars on the headboard to make it boy appealing. Since then, the number of items joining Simon in bed has grown exponentially.
First came the cars. The original six were joined by two match box cars and a metal toy bus. Then a black NASCAR of unknown provenance joined in, then a cable car I brought home from San Francisco, then an automoblox Shawn and Yun gave him, and then a metal VW bug from our neighbor Sue. He loves them all, and they all must join him.
Then Aunt Barb noticed that the NASCAR was #25, a driver she did not like, so we went out and bought #14, Tony someone-or-other, who she likes much better. Simon agrees that Tony someone-or-other is great, so now “the Tony car” joins him, too. As do Thomas, second Thomas, Percy, Gordon and Douglass from his train set. When I tried to point out that all these vehicles did not fit on his headboard, Simon demurred for a moment, and then realized his footboard was unused real estate.
Then there are the animals. In the crib, Simon was joined by, I think, Super Speedy, Mr. Froggy, Baby Bunny, Annabel, and his three blanket animals, aka the dirties. There’s Dirty Dog, Dirty Dog’s Twin, and Funny Monkey. Funny Monkey has a twin, too, but Simon doesn’t know that yet. The twins were originally purchased to facilitate washing.
Once Simon realized he had more space, the menagerie grew to include an old Care Bear from my mom’s house, a story-telling Bear from Aunt Barb, and giant Baby Bob the rabbit from Easter ’08. Then Barb came back from Florida with Ally the Alligator, a new love who must ride in the car with him by day and sleep with him at night. Then a new Curious George with Jumpy Squirrel and a flashlight arrived on his birthday. That George in turn reignited interest in the original Curious George, the one without whites to his eyes, that Simon got for Christmas last year. Simon calls him “Funny-looking George” and has decided that he’s a very good friend, too.
Finally, at the end of each night, at least one of the books we have read must go under his pillow. The remaining ones are stacked at the foot of the bed. Simon would prefer to be tucked in with all of these books, but since he is already grasping three blanket toys and two cars/buses/train engines, he’s out of hands before we get to the literature.
And that is how the simple of job of changing sheets on a small, twin-sized bed got to be so time-consuming. All told, aside from the standard bed linens and his removable bed rail, I am also moving and replacing the following:
- 17 total vehicles
- 11 total stuffed animals
- 1 or 2 books under the pillow
- 1 pillow to sleep on
- 1 pillow with a decorative sham
- 1 small pillow to angle his main pillow for better sinus drainage
I’d protest and think about simplifying were it not for the fact that Simon loves his bed, goes to bed without complaint, sleeps through the night, takes long naps most days, and says things like “I need to go to bed” and “I love sleep.” That kind of sleep hygiene is well worth the hassle on sheet changing days.
